


The Resurrection Machine

by FutureSeer



Category: Xena: Warrior Princess
Genre: Action, Egypt, F/F, Mel/Janice, Occult, Post-FIN, Resurrection, Romance, Xena/Gabrielle fanfiction
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-04-08
Updated: 2019-04-17
Packaged: 2020-01-07 01:34:24
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,110
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18400448
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FutureSeer/pseuds/FutureSeer
Summary: What you are about to read is the subject of much debate— be it ceremonial magick, a dialogue with goddess Nuit of the Egyptian pantheon, or the very idea of a Resurrection Machine. While the veracity of scroll 65’s claims will be hotly argued among the disciplines, I am but a translator. I write what the words say. We are, however, scientifically certain that the hand who penned 65 is none other than Gabrielle, Bard of Potidaea. It is believed to be the last scroll authored by Gabrielle. It takes place directly after the death of her beloved in Japa (modern-day Japan).  Gabrielle decides to travel to the Land of the Pharaohs—the very country I write from now that has offered us sanctuary from the war—in effort to resurrect the mythic Xena of Amphipolis. Perhaps it is a diary, errant and fraught with mourning, and it is merely a woman in pain stretching across the Divide to reach us.Melinda PappasAlexandria, May 1943





	1. i

 

**NOTES ON NEW EDITION**

With the release of 2019’s extended scholarly edition of _The Resurrection Machine_ , the editors have included select journal entries from scroll 65’s translator, Melinda Pappas, and her archeologist partner, Dr. Janice Covington. The editors are sure Dr. Covington would prefer the term ‘daily log’,  but nonetheless they provide an account of the curious history of scroll 65. For it is a story in itself how Pappas and Covington even came to acquire scroll 65 and what they had to do to keep the scroll safe long enough to imagine a cipher.

**ΞΕ´**  
  
---  
  
 

Translation by Melinda Pappas

With commentary by Dr. Janice Covington

 

**Translator’s Foreword**

 

It has been over three years since I touched the first brittle papyrus of an original Xena scroll. I fell immediately in love with the Bard’s careful margin notes, her drawings of indigenous flowers safe to eat, how her letters became bolder ink in an arc of action or passion. With the invaluable guidance and gall of my colleague, Dr. Janice Covington, we have been able to recover and translate the entire catalog of known Xena scrolls. All but one final scroll: the infamous **ΞΕ´** , or Scroll 65.

Written in a strange pastiche of lettering—Mycenaean Greek, with a standard linear b-syllabic structure, yet also Theban (a magical alphabet meant to occlude meaning, predating the first known usage by 1,700 years!) and some Coptic characters—this scroll is markedly different from any other recovered. Each scroll heretofore has been oratory in nature; scroll 65 is shrouded in coded language, meant only for private exorcism or the deeply occult machinations of the sage. Language therein flits between the broad impersonality of spiritual wisdom, the sometimes confused ebb and flow of memory, and the stark, haunting statements of personal loss.

The opening  line (“I sing of”) is crossed out, signaling a break with epic tradition; there is no invocation of a Muse. Then, “she wandered the wilderness” lends heroic color, nodding to the Mesopotamian _epikos_ of Gilgamesh. The herald shifts to the end of part _i_ , perhaps to indicate the polarity of a simultaneous ending and beginning. Or, rather, it is simply an early example of what Joyce and Woolf are attempting today: stream of consciousness, unfettered by the linear constraints of time. Perhaps it is a diary, errant and fraught with mourning, and it is merely a woman in pain stretching across the Divide to reach us.

Fascinating and terrible, what you are about to read is the subject of much debate— be it ceremonial magick, a dialogue with goddess Nuit of the Egyptian pantheon, or the very idea of a Resurrection Machine. While the veracity of scroll 65’s claims will be hotly argued among the disciplines, I am but a translator. I write what the words say. We are, however, scientifically certain that the hand who penned 65 is none other than Gabrielle, Bard of Potidaea. It is believed to be the last scroll authored by Gabrielle. It takes place directly after the death of her beloved in Japa (modern-day Japan).  Gabrielle decides to travel to the Land of the Pharaohs—the very country I write from now that has offered us sanctuary from the war—in effort to resurrect the mythic Xena of Amphipolis.

_Melinda Pappas_

_Alexandria, May 1943_

 

* * *

  


**ΞΕ** **´**

  
i.

 

~~I sing of~~

She wandered the wilderness in the skin of a sacred deer, driven to madness by whispers from beyond the veil. She painted herself in blood. Her wailing echoed the badlands. She abandoned her body, her beautiful body, to rot in some nameless northern field. She became a shaman for my sake and stole into the [afterlife/heaven/land of the dead] to find me. What will I become to find her?

 

 _I searched for you,_ she said. Never a moment’s doubt that we would be reunited. Who keeps looking for a person believed dead?

 

Potidaea was quiet under a full moon. We were camping in my father’s barn and I was mesmerized by its white edge peeking from a hole in the thatching. I lay there, unable to sleep. Next to me, there she was alive, a band of moonlight fallen across her face, washing her cheek pale and wan. I thought of her corpse on Mt. Nestos. I let the Amazons convince me not to honor her body in the manner of her choosing; I was going to set her to pyre in a foreign land. I let the nightmares consume me. I thought of how weak and naive I had been to blindly accept her death. Never again, I vowed. Just like she had searched for me, I would search for her. Whatever happened, I would find her.

 

And yet, here I am. Seasick on this ship adrift in the Red Sea. Holding Xena’s ashes in my hand, having burned her body in a faraway foreign land.

 

Of course it had to end this way. When I look back on our lives together, it all makes sense. No matter how much good we did—who we saved, who we killed—it never made any difference to Xena. While I tried my best to adorn her in fine heroic words, it was never a story of redemption to her. In her heart, she deserved to die.

 

It’s hard not to think it was all moot. All our war and heartache. She was fighting for a redemption that she would never allow herself. So, it is strange [moral/sacred] ground that I tread. Do I honor this last wish of the one I love best? Will I accept her death this time? It was her choice to die. It wasn’t mine.

 

Oh, Xena.

 

How do I reconcile the body that was once warm and flushed? The body that I watched run and ride and fight. The body that I evoked with ink, fingers, lips. The body that I loved. How do I reconcile that body with the one pale and strung up like a carrion deer— I’m going to be sick.

 

I watch the bile disappear into the froth of the ship’s wake. There is not a soul on this cargo ship that knows me from any other traveler. I have wrapped myself in Xena’s old cloak. It smells like campfire and horse— but it smells like her, too. It makes me want to cry forever, that scent. Will it fade from this cloth? Oh, please, don’t let it fade.

 

Who knows what she did with her leathers and armor. I wasn’t able to recover her things from Japa, so this cloak is one of few possessions I have left. I feel the cool metal of the chakram at my hip. And that too…

 

I sing of [life/death]. The Grand Polarity. I sing of grief.

 

I sing of Xena.

 

**Commentary 1**

There are many terms used in part I that warrant deeper reflection. Some words, such as the one used to signify ‘afterlife’ or ‘spirit realm’, are so archaic that much of the implicit meaning and sociocultural context is lost. We can ascertain ‘afterlife’ as a place, replete with its own kind of dimensional laws, that—if invoked from the wilderness of the mind—can be reached. Of less mystery is the term found at the close of part I: The Grand Polarity.

Here, we have a cache of philosophical and theological thought to draw upon. The Grand Polarity is a hermetic concept, found in the writings of Hermes Trismegistus, the Thrice Great. It is said to be the cipher of most magickal work. It dictates that every like thing oscillates on a spectrum: What is the difference between hot and cold? At what point have we traveled so far East that we are now West? A matter only of degrees. We cannot turn a stone into a bird. But, by firm meditations, we can turn ice to water, anxiety to calm, hate to love, death to life.

The Grand Polarity would have been familiar to the Bard, it having survived as a conception of reality since the days of Moses. By the time it was taught to Gabrielle by the prophet Eli, polarity had percolated up through the religions of Buddhism, Judaism, and many pagan sects of Antiquity. It was perhaps this idea of resurrection through polar shiftings of the mind that led Gabrielle to Egypt, where it was practiced as law under the rite of Nuit, Goddess of Heaven.

 

_Dr. J. Covington_


	2. Pappas journal entry #1

**From the journal of Melinda Pappas** : _February 7, 1943_

Bantus believed that all people once spoke a single language. Then, a great famine struck. People wandered in all directions, crazed with hunger, muttering strange words. Like any birth, this is the trauma of a grand separation.

Linguists will tell you that writing is an artifice. Spoken language is the only true expression of our combinatorial minds—our laryngeal, orofacial and respiratory muscles—our desire to be understood. Only then is language alive: syncopating, protracting, evolving. The act of writing is very much an act of entombment. We adorn and preserve and mourn each word that disappears to the dusty shelf of a library. How strange that we should memorialize our crazed muttering. And yet.

 

I feel as though it is necessary to shrug off the prescribed meaning of these old Greek words. Shrug off bored lectures at Smith (tired old Dr. Agape, strapped enough to begrudgingly come out of retirement to a women’s college no less; let him bed with the dogs). I love English, but fear that even my rebel language that makes rules just to break them will not suffice. Everything is new. Now I have the scroll. Can hold it in my hands, feel the coarse pulp, the stylus scratches— everything is different, infused with a boundless energy that my provincial Carolina fancy cannot conceive.

Why am I being so grandiose? Perhaps it’s the humidity of these cheap rooms. I told Janice we should spring for digs by the sea. At least then we could have opened windows to catch a cross breeze. Yet, I suppose one cannot be choosy if one is being smuggled.

As I write, Janice wears only her shirtsleeves, cigarette dangling from her lip, as she tinkers with her new invention. It’s logic-defying contraption of frame and springs she’s rigged to flatten papyrus that’s been wound for centuries.

“Goddammit,” she mutters when a spring bites her finger. Ash from her cigarette become motes in a beam of sunlight that passes through tattered muslin curtains. How shabby this place is. But, I shouldn’t complain. Our journey from Izmir to Alexandria was a clandestine, moonlit affair on a craft even the wildest imagination couldn’t call a ship. Turkey was sympathetic to our work at first, before the war encroached. Janice and I had set up a modest field office in which to begin translating our horde of scrolls recovered from the Temple of Ares.

That whole scene is still a phantom in my mind. To call it a possession would be a disservice at worst, inaccurate at best. To think: Me, a warrior? A myth incarnated by my bone and blood. I wrote an essay on the experience, but Janice thought I’d be blacklisted from academia for such claims. She’s probably right. Janice is always right about these things. Even having witnessed the spectacle with her own eyes, there was still a quiet moment of doubt.

“Maybe you’re a sleeper agent?” said Janice, over plum rakia in Istanbul.

It was meant to be a joke, but I recognized it as the product of a series of complex maneuvers from her rational brain. “Yes, Janice, the OSS is so hard up for assets, they’re recruiting from debutante balls. You read too much pulp.”

It was the first time I’d ever been fresh with her. I expected some wry retort, to be chastised. Her only response was a smile, one that resounded her blue eyes. It made me realize for the first (though certainly not last) time that Janice is indeed a woman, possessing a special beauty that all her rough ‘adventure’ clothing could do nothing to conceal. Her smile seemed familiar to me. Private, even. Meant only for me.

Then, Omer showed up with a bullet in his belly. Lucky he had stuck the scroll in a cartographer’s case, for he would have bled all over the precious cargo he gave his life to protect. And everything had changed.

I have to keep reminding myself that Janice and I are still virtually strangers, thrown together in this sweaty room by a conspiring of the Fates. Janice looks up from her contraption, having lit another cigarette: "It's ready."


End file.
